I still don’t understand the hatred and contempt (not singling you out), and I mean this literally. One minute Family Guy was just some offensive cartoon on Fox (ie not really worth much strong emotion either way.) Next thing I know, Seth McFarlane is singlehandedly responsible for the decline of western civilization.

Guess he’s doing something right as he’s hated by the whole political spectrum.

Next thing I know, Seth McFarlane is singlehandedly responsible for the decline of western civilization.

Yeah. I totally get the criticisms about offensiveness and insensitivity (the Chris Brown/Rihanna “joke” was a prime example of one of those “WTF” moves that Dr. Noisewater has referred to elsewhere — utterly unfunny and just horrible). But as crimes against humanity go, this is pretty thin gruel. I find the Oscars to be an interminable slog of tedium, mawkish self-congratulation, and general squirmy awkwardness in the best years.

I would assume that it’s just pent up frustration being released. McFarlane is pretty uniformly distasteful in the same way, but it’s generally confined to his hour and a half on Fox (well, that and the relentless hype for his movie, but that was a passing thing.)

But last night he had a major television event that he was bound to fuck up in predictable way, and that provides an outlet for a lot of dislike for him that’s built up but there’s never a good reason to express, and next week it’ll be forgotten and this Oscars will be remember for being the one with the tie and for Argo beating Lincoln.

People oft forget that before its initial cancelation, Family Guy actually had sympathetic characters and coherent storylines and jokes that were often as not actually funny. Obviously at this point the thing has descended into a lazy, obnoxious (and, let’s never forget, horrifyingly misogynistic) parody of its own worst tendencies, but I maintain that there was a time when it was actually good, though I can certainly understand how knowledge of where it would end up going would taint even that early stuff.

Charles Murray has repeatedly demonstrated that he is incapable of learning. Must have something to do with bell curves and genetics. Either that or his mother dropped him on his head as an infant. From great height. Repeatedly.

Wow, I had no idea that we were all holier-than-thou about McFarland and Family Guy. Talk about aesthetic Stalinism. As a very left wing academic, I am really horrified at my fellow left wing academics’ inability to navigate the world of humor without tripping all over their outrage. Relax and laugh some.

At what? The funny jokes that McFarlane has were funnier (and, honestly, more subversive) when I heard them on the Simpsons and/or Married With Children. It’s fine to repeat jokes or put a new twist on them, but when you do it you actually have to put your own spin on them, not just trot out the same “fat guy with a hot wife whose kids hate him joke #216″ and collect a paycheck.

I thought his Stewie Griffin stuff in the first season was really funny. Until I read Jimmy Corrigan, where Chris Ware had done the same thing only better (and honestly he got there first, even if it really was a coincidence). So I’m not seeing what McFarlane brings to the table as far as “funny” goes.

And yes, it is clearly derivative of the Simpsons, but McFarland has taken this in a whole new direction. He is very creative. Watch more episodes.

None of this is to say that his performance on the Oscars was worth a damn. Did anyone think it was?

And I only referenced the aesthetic Stalinism thing because it has been tossed around LGM before. And, I would argue, that a lot of the criticism leveled at McFarland here is due to his perceived (not real) sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. Lots of people dont get that satirical humor, and look at it as regressive, racist/sexist/otherwise. I think this is an intentional misunderstanding of that brand of humor. I also think it is destructive, because people use this total misapplication of charges of racism and sexism to marginalize and silence comedic voices that walk the line between hysterical and offensive. Funny lives on an edge, and dulling that edge sucks.

And, I would argue, that a lot of the criticism leveled at McFarland here is due to his perceived (not real) sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. Lots of people dont get that satirical humor, and look at it as regressive, racist/sexist/otherwise. I think this is an intentional misunderstanding of that brand of humor

‘You don’t understand, it’s really satire.’ The go to response when someone points out a comic is leaning on trite cliches about race and gender.

The only Macfarlane does that’s original is the thing that Chuck Lorre has ripped off him in turn for Big Bang Theory… where simply making a pop culture reference, with no actual joke attached, is supposed to make us laugh.

(I’m crediting him with originality here although I suspect he’s just noticed that smarter people make pop culture references in their jokes all the time; sadly, he’s not caught the fact that there needs to be something funny attached.)

It was really weird seeing jokes lifted directly from The Simpsons in Family Guy. I mean, they’re on the same network and at that point was immediately after it. Similarly in Ted there’s a disco scene lifted from Airplane that is simply a scene lifted from Airplane and nothing more.

I’m not as much of a Family Guy hater as most people seem to be on this thread – I liked the Star Wars thing for instance – but if you’re looking for stuff to hate it’s there.

Let’s see …(deep breath) … Hollywood and the movie industry treats women as sex objects, so that even the most-talented actresses must bare their breasts in movies; so we’ll demonstrate that by singing a song about how sleazy we are to have overlooked the art of those women and, instead, have ogled them, and we’ll point it out by being overtly sleazy, but it’s okay because we know we’re being sleazy, and we’re so knowingly sleazy that we show how we realized we should cut out the number, but we just can’t bear to actually cut it so we have created a framework employing time travel and Captain Kirk to show the audience something we know is really too sleazy to show them …

As someone who can be satirical and biting, I always keep in the back of my head there are lines I will not cross.

Believe me, there are lines well short of those that others wish I would not cross, but the point is, you can be biting and sarcastic — and funny — but there’s an art to it, and MacFarlane is at best a talented amateur. If your audience doesn’t get it’s a joke (cf Andy Kaufmann), you’ve lost them and the humour.

I’ll worry about “marginaliz[ing] and silenc[ing] comedic voices” when we no longer have national debates over whether it’s OK for someone like Daniel Tosh to “jokingly” threaten an audience member with rape, and speaking up about it earns her (or, rather, her friend) additional threats from angry, entitled Tosh fanboys.

Aesthetic Stalinism would be if we were criticizing McFarland for being insufficiently liberal or respectful of liberal values.

We are not doing that. We are criticizing McFarlane for being an unfunny, overrated hack. We are not relaxed and not laughing not because we are angry at McFarlane’s failure to advance the Glorious Cause, but because McFarlane’s work is not relaxing and, most importantly, not funny.

P.S. – Am I the only person that cannot keep Seth McFarlane and Scott McFarlane straight in my head?

Well, Scott did criticize McFarlane for “Four Hours of Witless Sexism & Racism” and link to the “depressing compendium of Oscar sexism.” I don’t claim any of this amounts to Aesthetic Stalinism, but the criticism of MacFarlane is certainly not merely for being unfunny … because that wouldn’t set him apart from most Oscar hosts.

You’re (intentionally?) ignoring the “witless” part of that criticism.

Some folks simply don’t find jokes about the unintelligibility of Spanish speakers and the boobage / trampiness / indefatigable persistence (in a bad, crazy way) of The Ladiez funny. There is that to consider.

Yup, that’s it. You figured me out. I’m a closet racist. I also conducted pogroms, held trials, and even instituted limpieza de sangre standards for my toys as a kid. I cant tell you how many cabbage patch kid mongrels and jewish James T. Kirk dolls went to the ovens. Tomorrow I am going to punch the first Asian I see. Or hit an Indian with my car.

On a more serious note, let me throw this one out there…. Could it possibly be that the intention of lampooning racial, gender, etc stereotypes in comedy has something to do with disarming those stereotypes, making them less noxious, and things that cannot be taken seriously? Could it be that this sort of satirical humor has a long history of doing just this sort of thing? After all, isn’t the basis of all humor really the realization that something perceived as a threat is not after all really a threat?

“Wow, I had no idea that we were all holier-than-thou about McFarland and Family Guy. Talk about aesthetic Stalinism. As a very left wing academic, I am really horrified at my fellow left wing academics’ inability to navigate the world of humor without tripping all over their outrage. Relax and laugh some.”

First, when somebody says ‘as a left wing academic….’ to support right-wing BS, you’re probably lying.

Second, Family Guy is drivel. It’s stupidly unfunny. I’ve seen a couple of films predicated on the idea that a funny 90-second skit *must* make a funny 90-minute movie, and they’re still funnier than Family Guy.

Family Guy isn’t even written by Seth McFarlane, so I don’t give him all the credit for the many episodes of the show I’ve loved over the years. If you want to shit on him, go right ahead. I’m sure he’s crying into his giant pile of money.

It’s a 23 episodes a season deal–plenty of crap with some real diamonds in there. And the diamonds make it worth more to me than most other programs.

Family Guy sucks when compared to good animated shows though. In Family Guy’s first incarnation, The Simpsons was still a great show and FG was deservedly cancelled for its lack of any central story elements, and constant cutaways for the literal interpretation of the joke.

As The Simpsons started sucking, the differences were less evident, but even MacFarlane’s own American Dad is a lot better than Family Guy in that it doesn’t want to constantly cut away or invest 15 minutes in a chicken fight.

It’s a different brand of humor, but one with a long pedigree — the pointless diversions were a staple of Laugh-In, Monty Python, the Carol Burnett show, and way before that you can go back to vaudeville. It’s not inherently inferior.

“It’s a different brand of humor, but one with a long pedigree — the pointless diversions were a staple of Laugh-In, Monty Python, the Carol Burnett show, and way before that you can go back to vaudeville. It’s not inherently inferior.”

however, all the shows you name, and vaudeville, were variety shows, none of mr. mcfarlane’s are, at least not intentionally so. this makes a big difference.

I think he’s a talented guy (Family Guy is occasionally really funny, he does amazing voice work and he has a gorgeous singing voice). But I’m sympathetic to those who don’t appreciate his particular brand of humor.

Is it fun to be a moron? I can’t imagine the levels of either stupidity or obtuseness required to think Chapelle’s Show is overtly racist and, even if you believe that, to think someone criticizing something is equivalent to “no one is allowed to watch it.” Seriously, aren’t you ashamed of that?

MacFarlane does seem to have a gift for voice work (I’ve never heard him sing that I can recall). But he is a “great comedian” in much the same way that Belle and Sebastian is a “great band”. Yes, there are some mangoes to be found there; some juicy, juicy mangoes. Great Cthulhu’s dormant hectocotylus, though, but don’t you have to wade through miles and miles of foetid, tiger-infested swampland to find them.

In the end, though, de gustibus and all that. We all find different things funny, or not funny, and comedy is notoriously refractory of analysis. And who am I to judge, anyway? My own tastes are hardly a touchstone; I don’t even find Adam Sandler especially amusing.

I know that Sandler’s bankability is nearly as reliable as it is inexplicable. And by all reports he is also, although Republican, a decent guy. He is simply dismally unfunny.

More than unfunny — he is profoundly irritating. And this is not the intense but ultimately superficial irritation that one experiences from, say, a Gilbert Gottfried, akin to a pebble in the shoe or a shard of dust in the eye. Sandlerian irritation is something fundamental, existential; no pebble in one’s shoe but rather a lifetime spent in a cheap motel in a small grey rainy industrial city in the Murmansk Oblast, with a flickering defective neon sign outside one’s window, nothing but Fox News on the TV, the vodka supply depleted, and billions and billions of years to go before the universe finally enters heat death.

This is all. If we’re going to bash MacFarlane (and there are many reasons to do so) can we at least take into account that

a) Family Guy started out pretty strong, and managed to get such a dedicated fan base it effectively vetoed it’s own cancellation. That’s pretty fucking impressive and generally a point against the line that MacFarlane is talentless and a hack.

b) Family Guy is very patchy right now. Cleveland Show has always been pretty bad. American Dad, despite predictions that it would date itself into irrelevance the moment W left office continues to be a pretty strong show. In fact, I’d argue that MacFarlane has managed to come close to The Simpsons overall output, in a vastly more compressed timescale, and with a comparable hit-miss ratio overall. (If you make the comparison from when FG first went on the air, the quality of MacFarlane’s output collectively far outstrips the Simpsons. Nothing to sneeze at.

c) he rubs a lot of people up the wrong way. Fair enough. But that’s a taste thing – it does not make him history’s greatest monster. Lets keep it in context people.

Wow. You really hate Family Guy. You spent this whole thread just saying “Family Guy sucks, and if you don’t hate it, you suck, because things can be bad!11!!!”.

About as artfully articulated as well. So if millions of people like something – but you don’t – it means that THEY must be wrong. Is it inconceivable people have different taste? I don’t think disliking Seth McFarlane is at all being an aesthetic Stalinist, but you’re making a case for yourself at least.

JFC. It’s not a question of “taste.” It’s a question of being willing to overlook the propagation of concepts that fuck a lot of people over. If this being brought up hurts your ickle feewers so much that you’re willing to compare vehement critics of MacFarlane to Stalin, that says a lot about you (as well as about the individual who first made that comparison in that thread).

You were the first person in this line of argument to start bashing people (“history’s greatest monster”) and then you were the first one to get personal with your “you… you… you” so if you want to talk about projecting, get bent.

Man, I don’t like Family Guy OR American Dad, but even the most cursory examination would reveal that the two are utterly different in terms of theme, tone, humor, character &c. No need to be dumb about it.

the quality of MacFarlane’s output collectively far outstrips the Simpsons

Wut.

I mean, I have seen almost no Simpsons past season 10, and I suppose it’s theoretically possible that the series’s widely acknowledged 2nd+ decade suxxxorage is grave enough to cancel out its earlier glories. But if that statement of yours were true or even halfway approaching truth, nations would be building temples to MacFarlane, and rightfully so. And nobody should build MacFarlane a temple.

One needn’t be a Seth Hata to say that. One’s judgment of MacFarlane could be, for example, that he has some quite funny bits, a respectable amount of mildly amusing stuff, and lots and lots and lots of meh. That’s my judgment of him, anyway. And it’s not an especially negative or hostile judgment. I don’t find MacFarlane annyoing because he is an unfunny failure (or even, like Adam Sandler, an unfunny success). Rather, I would sum up what annoys me about MacFarlane thus: I know Matt Groening; Matt Groening is an idol of mine; and you, Seth, are no Matt Groening.

I didn’t watch him MC the Oscars. I never watch those. I’ll take it as read that he sucked, but isn’t that pretty much a requirement of the job? That Charles Murray thought him boffo suggests that, if nothing else, MacFarlane got that part right.

I think the thing that bugs me about “Family Guy” is that so much of the humor resonates, and seems to be fairly in-line with my mindset about most things. Then along will come some joke about WNBA players being untalented and unattractive and it feels like being punched in the gut. And what’s weird is that that very joke seems at odds with a lot of the other humor to be found in the show.

i always think that’s the goal – that *everybody* is supposed to be hurt/offended/angered by something, and that’s how the creator/writer/whatever gets off the hook for being specifically racist, sexist, whathaveyou

Well, except that some of “offensive” stuff is actually insightful cultural critiques and some of it is just non-sequitor ad-hominem nastiness. And a lot of the non-sequitors are a.) unfunny b.) just so damn unnecessary.

It was (mark f’s qualification notwithstanding), and to me there’s a telling contrast between that one and the episodes featuring Brian’s gay cousin. Jasper is an old-fashioned flaming queen, but he’s also presented as lovable and a fully fledged member of the family. Lesbians, on the other hand, can only be hulking, humorless, man-hating amazons.

The way the one decent human being in the family – Meg – is treated, both by the other characters and the show itself (and as a lesser example Haley from “American Dad”) makes me wonder if McFarland doesn’t have a sister somewhere he’s still pissed off at for whatever reason. I couldn’t make it through an episode of “The Cleveland Show” to tell if that particular turd’s sister character got as much venom.

The treatment of Meg’s character is a tough hurdle…even when the show was at its best I had the feeling that they had no idea what to do with her other than to degrade her in every way possible. (I disagree with the analogy with Haley on AD, though…she’s a lot more together.)

I don’t get the impression McFarlane thinks of the characters in his shows as people, or even as characters. They’re stock types, occasions for running jokes and cultural references, placeholders for narrative tropes, and he doesn’t give a rat’s ass what happens to them. You could say the same about Gilbert and Sullivan, but they didn’t produce hundreds of episodes of The Mikado over eleven years, so the effect is a little different.

Yeah, even to the extent that I have liked Family Guy at times (I loved the marijuana episode, for instance), the treatment of Meg always bothered me, a lot. I never understood how it was funny to completely degrade and shit on a teenage girl, even a fictional one.

Because shows have a great diversity of writers, though, you are going to get some duds. Normally a show should be run carefully enough that such stuff doesn’t get through to the screen, but the Macfarlane shows aren’t run that carefully; they are sloppy. (Which, in its defense, the audience seems to like)

Honestly I think the punch in the gut is the point all by itself. Like the elevator incident under discussion the other day, it’s there mostly to let some people know they’re not really part of the club.

The Rush Limbaugh episode is filled with such self-loathing, but a lot of Brian related stuff has been filled with self-loathing, with the show’s one smart character with complex viewpoints continually fucking up his life. The Quagmire stuff is just bizarre; are we really supposed to think a serial rapist is a morally superior to Brian?

Right. Occasionally, SNL figured out a funny way to use his comic talents, and he was funny.(And while it wasn’t straight comedy, PTA made good use of his talents as well). But when Adam Sandler is in charge of figuring out how to make Adam Sandler funny, it’s an unmitigated disaster.

I really, really like Billy Madison. It’s, at least, a lot better than his later stuff because it has a fair amount of just random weirdness thrown in around the edges. And when it comes to the point of Billy actually learning something and moving the plot forward, it has the decency to do so by a musical number. Compared to his later movies that seem to actually be trying for sentiment, it’s light years ahead.

Apropos of nothing, but this thread makes so much more sense when viewed in the non-mobile version. Note to developers: if you can’t figure out how to link comment and replies when you’re making a mobile version, don’t make one.

this thread makes so much more sense when viewed in the non-mobile version

When I’m on my phone I still read in the full site format; there’s a button in the bottom left corner. It’s not as convenient functionally, but it makes the comments much more enjoyable. It also eliminates some of the confusion that results from, say, blockquotes not appearing properly in the OPs.

I thought Homer and Jethro’s (The Battle Creek Boys) “Ooh, that’s corny” album was the funniest thing ever when I was 5. Last time I listened to it, about 40 years later, I still thought it was funny. I ought to hook up my turntable and listen again, see if I stll think so. I think yes, so no definitive list of “funny” can be truly valid without that album.

And here I have to admit a soft spot for that stuff. It’s cornball, it’s dumb, it can creep up on offensive (but it rarely ever really goes there) but in a pretty lasting sense that’s my world, you know?

Many of their jokes are really dated, like the contemporary references Groucho and Chico drop into conversation (like the one about the Hays Code). If you didn’t study early 20th Century history, you’d never get them. Likewise some of the Yiddish references (“Did someone call me shnorrer?)

The jokes that occur in the interplay between characters (“I’d horsewhip you if I had a horse!”) hold up amazingly well, tho.

Personally I like Seth McFarlane even though a lot of his humor is a bit too nasty for me — too many poop jokes — and I love that he likes the old standards like Gershwin, Cole Porter, etc. But the real point here is that Charles Murray, who claims to be so knowledgeable about human intelligence and the proper way society should treat different groups of people, had no fucking idea who McFarlane was. If I were pontificating about who should be allowed to be first-class citizens and who should be helots, I’d want to have some actual knowledge of the society I was blathering on about.